Grubstakers - Episode 118: Masayoshi Son (SoftBank)

Episode Date: November 26, 2019

This week we’re covering the man formerly known as the Bill Gates of Japan Masayoshi Son. The world record holder for largest drop of net worth (70 Billion) the man who for 3 days was richer than Bill Gates, the early investor of Ali Baba, Uber and WeWork (oops!) The current owner of ARM chips, Boston dynamics, and a big believer in what will kill us all the singularity. We discuss how his investments in start ups have devastated the start up market. His way of judging a company is seeing if their CEO’s eyes have a certain fire in them. Lastly, we cover his Vision Fund the 300 year, 100-billion-dollar plan, which includes money from Saudi Arabia Public Investment fund seems to us this vision is to own Asia in all the worst ways. Enjoy!

I want to be held accountable for what I'm doing. This may sound like an exaggeration, but it was like the 9-11 of my career and certainly of making kombucha. Jesus is smart. This idea of income inequality, that always strikes me as a very, it's a deceptive term, income inequality. Well, let's flip it around. It comes from outcome inequality. All right, here's five, four, three, two. I got the loot, Steve. Hello, welcome back to Grubstakers, the podcast about billionaires. My name is Sean P. McCarthy and I'm joined here by...

Steve Jeffries. Andy Palmer. Yogi Poliwal. And so this week we're talking about, well, we've got a bit of a follow-up to our WeWork episode. We did an episode on Adam Neumann and WeWork and it destroyed the company. We were all short the stock and our master plan played out perfectly. That's right.

But yeah, so we recorded an episode where we all thought WeWork was about to launch an IPO in September and we were like, hey, this is a giant Ponzi scheme. And then everyone else was also in agreement with us and they had to push back their IPO. Yes, our death note style of podcasting finally works uh yeah but i mean it begs the question you know uh we work how does

something like that actually get into the public market it was pretty bad strategy to uh tank the company before they went public as a in terms of a shorting strategy where there's no way to actually short them we tried our best you know we didn't work together look i'm an ideas man i count on you guys to be the execution man i'm just angry at you guys because we didn't figure out how to short it um but no it begs the question how does a a company like WeWork, which had no conceivable way to make money, had the ridiculous $47 billion valuation, had something like $47 billion in obligations and $7 billion or so in actual income.

Wife, that's cousin of Gwyneth Paltrow, pushing goop propaganda to their employers and employees. It has the CEO selling the trademarks back to the company itself, renting buildings back to the company itself. Just clear self-dealing all over the place. And the question is, how does a company like that even get to the public market? And that is the subject of today's episode, which is we're talking about Masayoshi Son and his company, SoftBank. Masayoshi Son is a Japanese businessman, I believe the second richest man in Japan. He's worth, according to Forbes, as of November 2019, $18.6 billion.

And we'll kind of talk about today. He's done a lot of different things that we don't have time to get into all of, but I do want to follow up on the WeWork story and talk a little bit about uber something we haven't really talked about on this podcast um but i guess it's more maybe we've talked more generally about the current tech bubble that we're in right we're almost we're in the second tech bubble i think a lot of people would agree after the first one being of course the dot-com crash and masa yoshi son is actually the person who inflated both of those bubbles is how he became an 18.6 billion dollar he's filled with hot air he's been variously the almost the wealthiest person in the world

in the lead-up in 1999 and 2000 right before the crash uh he was briefly, he said, worth more than Bill Gates. For about three days. He was worth about, what was it, $80 billion or so. 78. In today's dollars. Oh, yeah, yeah. Actually, no, in then.

Yeah, in then. No, that's nominal. Right. And he has the record for losing the most net worth due to a fall in the stock market of about $70 billion. So he lost $70 billion on paper. Right. And I believe he had $8 billion to spare.

So even though he lost, he was a lean year in the Sun household. Yeah. But SoftBank, the business he started, is I believe the 36th largest company according to Forbes, top 1,000 companies. It's bigger than Amazon, bigger than Forbes, top 1,000 companies. It's bigger than Amazon, bigger than Coke, bigger than a lot of things. And the reason is because they're great at inflating other companies. Right. So he's just recently launched, as of 2017, he launched what is called the Vision Fund,

which is the largest private investment fund in history up to this point. It's a $100 billion investment fund. And we should note that $45 billion of this comes from the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, which I think is a funny story in the sense that he talks about, Masayoshi Son talked about, you know, hey, the singularity is coming. We got to invest in the singularity. And everybody was like, okay, I'm not giving you any money. And then he meets this dumbass who runs Saudi Arabia and takes a 45-minute meeting with him. And he's like, yes, I am giving you a billion dollars for every minute of this presentation. He's like, well, I mean, we've got money to spare.

Our bone saw budget, even though the largest of any country in the world is only about one million, they're pretty cheap. Right. So, like, we left off, like, WeWork in September was gearing up to do its IPO. Obviously, that didn't happen. It at one time had a valuation of about $47 billion

and fell to about $14 billion after investors got, after it was forced to do public filings for the ipo beforehand and people were able to see that it wasn't making money and also it had a load of debt right and it actually turns out that like as we turn our attention to masayoshi and the vision fund the vision fund which is about 97 billion right now is about $97 billion right now, is about 40% debt, the rest of it being equity. Nice. Which is absurdly high for a fund of this size.

Right. And so it's like even the money behind it is also pretty precarious. And it's sustained in large measure just by this sort of geopolitical equilibrium that Masayoshi is in with the crown prince of Saudi Arabia and some of the IPOs that they want to get into. Right, right. But the Vision Fund is set to receive some more money from the IPO in December of Aramco, which is the Saudi state-led oil company. It's one of the largest companies in the world. It's being valued at about $1.7 trillion.

Wow. and it uh last year it made about it netted about 111 billion dollars in income off 315 billion in revenue so uh it's just and this is a pretty weird decision for a forward-looking person like masayoshi who's all about like the future of mankind living in harmony with machines and stuff when we're in the midst of a climate catastrophe and he's willing to accept billions and billions and billions of dollars of one of the leading causes of our climate crisis. I feel like this is the most amount of money we've talked about on the show

in terms of the amount of moving capital. Yeah, for sheer capital flows this might be our our largest amount we've ever covered if you're masayoshi rich the the climate catastrophe thing doesn't affect you as much like i can he he bought boston dynamics and i i think his idea of the future is like all right right, well, there's going to be less people. But that's fine. I'll have a robot dog. I like to imagine like... Outfitted with a machine gun.

I like to imagine when he was pitching MBS to get the $45 billion. He was like, okay, look, the future, bone saws, those are in the past. The future, lasers. We're going to invent lasers that can cut the head off Washington Post journalists. You know, now that I think about it more, I do think he believes that we'll implant brains into robots in the near future. Because his entire view of the singularity is 100% like we're going to work harmoniously with it.

But you would think that he'd be like wait a second there's not gonna be enough air to breathe and his thought it's like we won't need air by then how many times you think he's watched evangelion and took the wrong message from it yeah well it's interesting like so uh this vision fund again launches 2017 100 billion dollar fund uh largest private wealth fund and largest active investment fund, I should say, in history. They deployed about 40% of that $100 billion within the first year. Right. So, again, we say he's inflating this second tech bubble, and we'll briefly cover what he did with the first tech bubble.

But when you have the largest private investment fund in history dumping literally billions into WeWork and Uber and all these other companies, Slack among others. They're dumping billions of dollars. So, of course, that causes inflated valuations because you have a dumbass known by the name of the crown prince of Saudi Arabia who just like you sit down with him for 45 minutes and talk about how like robots are going to start like killing your dissidents for you and you can automate the production and save on labor costs there and he'll just throw his fortune away because he's a fucking idiot who inherited it and has no idea what he's doing and then this creates artificial valuations yeah we're doing this the wrong way like if we were smart, we wouldn't have anything to do with Patreon. We'd just spend all our time working on our elevator pitches

for just dumb genocidal dictators running up a $40 billion debt and then running it through the Panama paper or through the Panama organizations before everything collapses. Well, I think that's the end of the show. I don't know. I don't see any reason why we've got to continue doing this. 80s certainly hit the nail on the head

there. But there is, I do want to credit, there's a defunct podcast called Slaying the Unicorn. They recorded like four episodes and they dropped off, but they talked a little bit about SoftBank. And I did just want to credit them because they said something that I thought was very insightful, where they said most venture capitalist firms, which in this case, the SoftBank Vision Fund is operating as such, they essentially operate as glorified PR shops, where it's like, okay, so here's my investment, and now I'm going to be a PR firm for this investment to try and get other fucking suckers to be like, this is the future. And so, you know, you listen to all these interviews with Masayayoshi son and maybe we'll play a little bit of some of them but he always talks about again the singularity the idea that the robots are coming uh so all of my investments are in i'm going to control every

single part of the robot ecosystem right and he bought um this this british company called it yeah it's like the matrix but i get to be the boss still still struggling with where we work fits into this robot this robot future personally that's where they're gonna put the pods yeah they need housing for the robots so that's where we came in it does seem like that was the only reason why masayoshi well we will get into this a little later but everyone that masayoshi dumps you know a dickload of money into he just talks about their confidence in the meeting. It's rarely about what the actual idea is or the execution of it,

and it's more like he literally talks about Jack Ma being like, he had a passion in his eyes. Vibes, bro. Well, yeah, so his most successful investment was Alibaba. In the year 2000, and we talked about this a bit on the Jack Ma episode. The year 2000. And we talked about this a bit on the Jack Ma episode. No.

I'm just not going to say that date anymore. Nothing ever happens in that year. It's always 1999 or 2001. And the year after 1999, one year before 9-11. But we talked about it on the Jack Ma episode. Masayoshi Son gave Jack Ma $20 million in this aforementioned year. And as of the IPO, Alibaba IP the one of the largest return zone investment in history. And the thing about that is he entirely just said, I met Jack Ma.

He had no business plan and no idea what he was doing, but I liked the look in his eyes. He had strong eyes. Exactly. That's right. That's what he says in the interview. Yeah, yeah. And so this is where we talk about Masayoshi-san. And on some level, you can't help but kind of like the guy,

even if he is an evil person or part of an evil system, etc., etc. But this is a guy who made his fortune by walking into the casino and putting it all on 12 black or whatever. Well, I think it's more that he puts the money on all of the numbers. In the roulette wheel of business, he goes, I need money on all of this. And the ones that come back back he uses that to double down and also re-bet on the table again it's actually similar to warren buffett so he has like buffett would have like a few in one sector of companies right you'd have a few well number one have enough capital to do sort of like a scatter shot of investing right but have

like a few sort of ones that you're really psyched about and you devote more to but you also sort of uh play the whole board sure i guess and um try to try to dream up a few metrics to tell you like oh i should invest 500 million this one and then a smattering of millions and the other ones but a few billion in these big players i think will really make make my portfolio and um i guess just uh to kind of go through the uber and we work story like again we won't get to all the investments but i think we should mention uber and we work um this vision fund uh again uh with 45 billion worth of saudi arabian money so maybe this is like a very um transgressive performance piece he is doing right to like take funds away from the war in Yemen and dump them into dipshit startups in New York by fucking fail kids uh but so he invests uh um

he buys let's see according to a recent UN um uh paper on war crimes in the war in Yemen coalition airstrikes regularly target residential areas, markets, funerals, weddings, detention facilities, civilian boats, and even medical facilities, including several Doctors Without Borders hospitals. Got to keep innovating. Yeah. Once Boston Dynamics comes in,

we can cut the cost in half on all that stuff. I think that's really where Masayoshi-san is comingoshi sounds coming from look masa knows that once there are robot nurses that saudi won't be able to murder nurses anymore um but i've been 11 airstrikes hitting civilian boats off the shores of hudaya from november 2015 until may 2018 of which nine were reviewed and two investigated by the group of experts approximately 40 fishermen were killed or disappeared it's worth noting that uh yemen is having a severe famine right now and in another incident examined by the group in which coalition aircrafts targeted a boat

carrying refugees on 17th of march a total of 32 somali refugees including 11 somali women and one civilian were killed and another 10 persons were reported missing which means they probably drowned bummer anyways this guy does a lot of innovating you know one thing i would cut you off earlier about but they did buy arm uh the uk company for i think 36 billion if not something they're 32 i think yeah and uh arm makes every chip in your phone or computer maybe not your computer but they have a large share of all of the chipsets in the world like the vision for the vision fund it hasn't it's been kind of a mixed record in terms of just raw investment performance so like obviously uber slack and we work are kind of dragging the entire operation down but there have been some other like

some other areas he's had some excess like in biotechnology like there's this group called 10x genomics and then also another one called ver biotech in um also in europe and they've been kind of gaining for a couple of years but in the aftermath like in the aftermath of adam newman and we work and like masayoshi himself said of newman quote we have created a monster and i like how he's hard harsher words for that guy than the one doing a genocide in yemen yeah yeah so nothing at all to say about Salman. But this really spooked, I mean, this got leaked to the press and it eventually spooked investors

almost as much as like the initial WeWork, like bad press. And they started questioning like, well, what about all these other tax companies that they're invested in that have like a charismatic founder and not much checks on their power within the company.

So like there's another Indian startup called Oyo, which like investors in Japan actually were like really psyched about, but started pulling some money from just based off of the corporate governance structure where it was just like the founder can do whatever he wants basically and so it caused um soft bank to kind of retool their requirements for startup month giving startup money to these groups and like so now they want like to have at least one board seat for soft bank right at least one independent director uh a ban on super voting shares. So like shares that have more voting power than others on the board.

And then they also want to limit how founders and like top senior managers, they can't have more than half the board seats collectively. Oh, really? So they're trying to like basically say okay we're we're reigning in control there won't be any more adam newmans in our in our main in our main investments they're eliminating the fun ceos is what you're saying they're eliminating the wild guns the mavericks yeah that's right guys monday afternoon happy hour is over speaking of no checks on power um the saudi coalition has uh struck or has launched airstrikes on clearly marked ambulances and on 11 june 2018 uh doctors without borders uh reported that there

was an airstrike on a new cholera treatment center again the world's biggest cholera outbreak is occurring in yemen due to starvation and regular bombing of sanitation facilities, including sewage and water treatment facilities. Even though Doctors Without Borders had reported to the Saudi coalition on 12 separate occasions that it was a medical facility not to be targeted. So you're saying that, you know, he had $45 billion to spare. I mean, with all of that prosperity, you just, you know, might as well give the money away 45 minutes 45 billion well and so now he's trying to so they they kicked adam newman out of we work uh after the fiasco and now they're trying to get it back under control but they still are supposed to pay adam newman 1.7 billion dollars for running this thing into the ground and the press reports are that they're trying to claw back some of that but we'll see how much they end up just giving

you probably walk away with at least a billion dollars worth of just saudi blood money which you know hey good for him but um grift yeah and so just to quickly do the uber story here before we get into the actual biography of masa san-san. They are Uber's largest single shareholder. They own about 15%. CNBC said that as of September 2019, they've taken about $600 million in losses on this. They made a $7.65 billion investment in early 2018. They were buying shares from existing investors for $48.77 per share, purchasing new shares for about $33. Uber, as of November 22, 2019, is trading at $29.50. So they've lost a lot of money on that. They lost even more on WeWork. They own about 80% of WeWork. They put about $18.5 billion in this thing. And again, they were buying it at a $47 billion valuation,

which people are questioning if it's even worth $7 billion, if it's even worth $1 billion. If you want to talk about the efficiencies of capitalism, take a look at how well Uber is performing in the market and how much the top executives are getting paid. Right. So Uber did its IPO May may 2019 it has lost one third of its value from that ipo but uh that didn't stop you know goldman sachs and all the other banks who

were doing that ipo from uh selling uber stock to pension funds 401ks whoever the fuck so you know they've dumped they've managed uh they weren't as successful at doing this with WeWork, but they did manage to dump Uber on the investing public when it had no fucking way of making money. Fucking crooks. Yeah. And so, you know, that's kind of my thesis for SoftBank. It's like, you know, we talk about Uber and WeWork and these other unicorn tech companies and SoftBank is the hive cluster. Right. It is like, if this is the Aliens movie,

this is where they are all coming from. We have to get up in orbit and nuke SoftBank from orbit. And that's the only way to save the tech sector in the globalized economy. Probably not the best analogy when referring to the second richest man in Japan. We're trying to make the argument that he's on the side of war crimes.

No, he's Korean. Well, he's Japanese. We'll get into that. He is a Korean-descended Japanese. Sean is a Japanese nationalist and believes that he is not an authentic Japanese man because of his Korean ancestry. No, this is not an authentic Japanese man because of his Korean ancestry. No, this is not me.

There's a term in Japan, Zayanchi. Zayanichi? Zayanichi. The Zayanichi Japanese. And so this is a word that means temporary resident in Japanese, and it refers to Korean people. He's a third-generation resident of Japan, and the Japanese word for what he's a third generation resident of japan and his uh the japanese word for what he

is is a temporary resident has three generations of families living in japan uh but yes we we can get into that here though we should also mention uh softbank also owns sprint as of 2012 they uh spent a lot of money on that and also as of the time we're recording this, November 23rd, 2019, as of two weeks ago, about SoftBank reported their first quarterly loss for, I think, 14 years. Because, you know, we mentioned this Alibaba investment. That's really been propping them up in particular. So they've had losses on paper and also in sales. And it finally got reflected in their quarterly report on friday the dow hit record highs guys we are in boom times

nowhere to go but up the the sprint t-mobile merger is also i think being orchestrated by masayoshi as well um that i don't think it's gone through yet. He bought Sprint at a very low cost, and Sprint's like number three, potentially number four, and then the T-Mobile merger with Sprint was supposedly about to happen, and then it got shut down, I believe, but I don't know enough information about that,

but the entire Sprint T-Mobile merger slash owning Sprint is all Masayoshi-san. Masa was like, I don't care how much it costs, you have to get me the Verizon ad guy guy 10 billion dollars but that like for the verizon ad guy that entire campaign is masayoshi because sprint was like you know running out of money they were going to be bankrupt and and out of a job but masayoshi-san came in and picked them up all right but um i guess is there anything else we should kind of tell people to introduce him before we get into the chronological biography he's a leo that's true uh can i just cap off the week we're of course yeah we should update our we work so well like i think just like reading

through the situation with the vision fund or amco and we work is like uh all of the problems that people brought up about we work are present in the vision fund to maybe to a lesser extent but it's still there like there's a mountain of debt 40% of the portfolio that it's built upon with countries engaged in war crimes as of April 2018 nearly 17.8 million people in yemen were food insecure that's out of a country of 25 million people and 8.4 million were on the brink of famine health care facilities were not functioning clean water was less accessible in yemen is still as i mentioned suffering from the largest outbreak of cholera in recent history with over 2 million cases so do you want like do you want should should we really be pouring in $97 billion worth of private funds into the, some of it coming from the proceeds of companies that are directly responsible for the climate change and also states responsible for mass war crimes in Yemen?

Well, you know, the robot dogs aren't profitable yet, but they're still pretty cool. So it's nice that the Vision Fund is keeping Boston Dynamics afloat. They haven't innovated Doctors Without Souls yet. Yeah, I would say the counterpoint is like, what if the Vision Fund fails and then Saudi Arabia gets really mad at the people of Yemen? Like, you thought they were

doing a genocide before they lost their 45 billion but now they're pissed okay it's like the woke the woke interpretation is they're taking money away from the saudi the saudi war effort right so yeah i guess there's that the vision fund fails and saudi just starts nuking yemen what makes me really suspicious about like this oncoming crash is that whenever there's a stock market crash or just an economic depression or whatever, that money never really disappears. It just moves to the people who have the best position. For instance, in the last recession obviously billionaires got way richer at the expense of everyone else and i'm just wondering like whether this guy has like

an ace in the hole to secretly profit off of it looking at what happened after the dot com probably not because he clearly was the sucker in that arrangement well he's just like he's so heavily exposed to the tech sector that like you know people like him are gonna bite the dust but they still have eight to ten billion dollars at the end of the day. Yeah. And other billionaires see it as a huge opportunity. The ones who aren't necessarily so much in that sector. Right, who short it and whatnot.

So for them, it's not really a recession at all. Yeah, and the only thing they'd really have to do to stop the crash from occurring is stop being them. If he just was like, you what i'm good i'm gonna retire there's a chance i mean like it probably would burst but it wouldn't uh do it nearly at the rate it probably would at this point yeah and um and you know it is like steve mentioned is where we'll probably follow up on this at the end but there is a possibility that you know soft bank the vision fund itself is we work on a much larger scale yeah so you know if SoftBank, the Vision Fund itself, is WeWork on a much larger scale.

Yeah. So, you know, if you thought, we talked about on the WeWork episode that if WeWork goes under, like, the rental office space market in New York and London would collapse. I mean, if you can imagine what would happen if the largest investment fund in history goes under, you know?

So, like, it could be the case that, all right, WeWork goes under. You thought you took care of the hive, actually that was just a sub-colony You haven't even found the queen yet Right Is this Halo 2 where you have two guns? And multiplayer too Oh yeah

Online multiplayer, Halo 2 introduced it Right, it's like Starcraft Where you think you killed the first um high cluster that was just an expansion but i guess we should start with the chronological biography of masasan he is korean so i guess that works yeah yeah it does it applies yeah um so masasan is born in 1957 in Toso, Japan. It's like an island. Yeah, the southern island.

No, it's a small town. It's like an island in Japan. One of those rare Japanese islands. It's the southern island of Kyushu. Kyushu. Kyushu. It's a town on the southern island of Kyushu. Kyushu. Kyushu. It's a town on the southern island of Kyushu. He's born there in 1957.

Again, he is a third-generation Korean-Japanese. His parents or his ancestors came from Korea three generations back from 1957, and he was bullied as a child because he was Korean. Apparently Japanese children in grade school threw rocks at him for being Korean. Yeah, and I read another story that he grew up needing to scavenge food from neighbors to feed his family and he was in a cart pushed by his grandma that was for chicken shit, essentially. So he grew up in very, very meager poverty, according to himself. Oh, I thought you were saying he grew up needing to harvest Vespian gas in order to survive.

No, literally, in some of the articles... Is he a Zerg player, though? Zerg is the people's race. It was like they had to scavenge leftovers from other families. I feel like this guy is a toss player. People don't talk a lot about how completely and utterly devastated Japan was in the decades following the war. Economically. But then, of course, America poured money into it because it was a bulwark against communism.

And it grew to become what it is now. He was like, my family only had one pylon between all of us. We had to scavenge. We had to go fast-forge expand. We had no choice. No, actually, but so counter to Yogi's story, according to Wired magazine, I'm just going to quote from this. He is not, however, a rags to riches story his

father ran a thriving chain of pachinko parlors at 16 uh masasan shipped off to california to learn english and eventually enrolled at uc berkeley in california so it's like clearly his family had enough money to send him to california to go to college there you'll have that big chinko but it's like really profitable. Oh, yeah. And it's like a huge, it's actually a really large part of the Japanese economy. Actually, I heard that situations

were so dire that on the 31st of August 2017, the founder of the Yemen Red Crescent Society died because he couldn't obtain life-saving treatment that he needed in Yemen and could not travel abroad for such treatment because the Sana'a International Airport was closed to commercial traffic.

It was closed to commercial traffic? Yeah. People were like, I'm going to go to Yemen for the holiday. You can't fly out of the airport. Oh, you can't fly. I got you. Even for life-saving medical treatment. The Saudis were doing a dark Templar drop against civilians. There's two people I want to mention that he, at ages 15 15 inspired him immensely one of them is uh sakamoto ryoma which uh steven you're saying is a huge figure in japan yeah he's one of like the most influential politicians in japanese history it uh on ryoma's wikipedia the the legacy of him talks about how he was a visionary who dreamt of an independent japan without feudalism

or the caste system, inspired by the example of the United States where all men are created equal. Masayoshi-san read a book about him when he was 15 and it inspired him greatly. But he also was inspired by the founder of McDonald's Japan, Den Fujita,

who, among other things, wrote The Jewish Way of Doing Business. It was a bestseller. It explained that Jews had taken over the business world and exhorted his readers to use Jewish business methods to become rich themselves. The book was also part autobiography in which Fujita drew parallels between anti-Semitism and the discrimination he himself faced because of his Kansai dialect.

He also believed that Jews had settled in Osaka some 1,000 years ago, which was why people from the area were craftier businessmen. This sounds like investment strategies from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The long lost chapter. I mean, it kind of is. Of portfolio management. You think that's why he gave Adam Neumann $18.5 billion? He's like, I read a book saying these people were crafty.

Den Fujita in the book would say like, you know, in business, the only justice is winning. Then there is neither clean money nor dirty money. In a capitalistic society, all methods of making money are acceptable. So, I mean, Rich dad, poor dad, international Jew dad. You know, just a ruthless businessman. So, there were... I mean, there's evidence of some Jews

in the 16th century in the area he's talking about. Oh, really? But not a thousand years ago. Sure, sure. So, Dan Fujita was... That's anti-Semitic, Stephen. Oh, sorry. Claiming there were no Jews in Japan a thousand years ago.

When did he set up McDonald's Japan? In 1971 is when he started his franchises in Japan. And he was quoted as saying, the reason Japanese people are so short and have yellow skins is because they have eaten nothing but fish and rice for 2,000 years. If we eat McDonald's hamburgers and potatoes for 1,000 years, we will become taller, our skin become white, and our hair blonde. You know, I took one biology class in college, and that checks out.

So you think eating McDonald's will make you white? Yes, precisely. I can't wait until like 10 years from now we start seeing the first articles like, why is life expectancy declining in Japan? Has something changed in their diets? So continuing with what Sean was saying with their family having money. That is pretty fucked up. Eat McDonald's, it'll make you white.

Yeah, that's precisely what he was saying though and he was very successful doing it he had like a billion dollars after like i think about 10 years of being the japanese mcdonald's founder um masa yoshi-san as a 16 year old would call uh fuchida's office every day and then ask him if he's loving it he wanted to have a phone call with them and then the secretary would be like no kid fuck off and so you realize the international the long distance phone calls were costing more than if you just flew there so we flew to where Fujita was and like basically forced himself into a meeting and Fujita was like I like you you're a moxie kid and uh Masayoshi uh asked him like what should I be focusing on and Fujitaita was like, you should get into computers. And the inspiration for him going overseas to study.

Skin tone and race science. Study the Jews, kid. What came from Fujita, basically. And when later on, we'll mention Masayoshi starting SoftBank. Fujita was on the original board for SoftBank. Right. Bank to the bio. Fujita's like, I believe in two things,

pink slime and a small cabal of international bankers that control all world events and that we should emulate them. Yeah, so, you know, and that's the guy who, of course... The protocols of how to win friends and influence people. And that's, of course, the guy that Masa says inspired him. And, you know, like yogi just said he met him when he was 16 and he says learn english and don't go into the past industries

don't go into you know hamburgers go into computers that's the future so masa takes this advice to heart yeah fujita uh one last thing about him like he was a translator for the u.s because he spoke english and uh just making everything anti-Semitic. Then he found out that computers make you Polynesian. He was like selling handbags at first. He was like import-exporting handbags between the two countries. And then he realized like that's not going to work.

So then he like, he got tapped by McDonald's to be their ambassador for Japan, basically. Very interesting guy, Dan Fujita. There's an interview with Letterman and Fujita. And it's almost scene by scene the same as the Pulp Fiction, what do they call it in Denmark? It's that same type of thing. You guys have Big Macs?

What do you guys call them? Big Maca. This is the entire interview between latterman and fujita yeah but so according to the new york time his uh masasan's grandparents came over from korea and then his parents uh lived in japan again his dad had the pachinko machine parlors um and so they send him after he meets with the mcdonald's ceo he wants to go to california learn english learn the computer industry so they send him out to california he goes to high school out there for a bit at 16 he goes to the united states goes to high school goes to uc berkeley gets a economics degree in 1980 from uc berkeley and um i read one where he went to saint mary's

for two years and then transferred to uc berkeley i think so i think that's correct then i read one where he went to saint mary's for two years and then transferred to uc berkeley i think so i think that's correct then i read another thing that was saying that he finished high school in like three weeks i'm not sure about that like i did see that yeah it's like a clearly like propaganda thing where it was like he just was in high school for two weeks and was like i'm just gonna take the college test there's one thing i've realized about billionaire back stories is that they're not under oath yeah well that's like i don't know do we have that drop of him saying i invented things in five minutes so he gives an interview to david rubinstein who we did an episode on the carlisle group about is like one of the

most evil people in history who just does a very boring interview show and makes dumb jokes about like if my tie is not messy how will people know it's me? Which like I was saying, you almost hope he worships Moloch and sacrifices children because then the world makes more sense. These evil people are not just like boring people making dad jokes. Um, but so he does,

David Rubenstein does an interview show and he interviews, uh, Masayoshi Son, uh, Son. And, uh, he asks him, you know,

how did you invent all this stuff? What was your method? It's invention and I have to file a patent. If I get the patent, five minutes, if I focus, I can come, some idea. I can make some idea. So I set alarm clock five o'clock, five minutes. And tick, tick, tick.

In five minutes, I said, come. Invention, come. Come. So I did that. And it worked. It worked. You invented a machine that helped people translate languages? Yeah.

That one was the electronic dictionary. Yeah, and so this is him explaining. Wow, that looks like shit. A picture of it. He's at UC Berkeley, and he's like talking about, Masasan is talking about, I told my friends, you know, that we would hang out, and I would say, okay, I take five minutes every day, and I try to invent things.

Come! Yes. He shouts come at the alarm clock until he invented an electronic dictionary. Cum, cum. Cum. Which, not quite the real story, would that surprise you to know.

Sounds like me having sex with my girlfriend. Cum, cum. So the real story this is the electronic dictionary he's talking about like his story is i just again shouted come at an alarm clock until for five minutes a day come invention come until i just made an electronic dictionary according to arstechnica.com, the actual story is he met Forrest Moser, F-O-R-R-E-S-T-M-O-Z-E-R, who invented and patented the first speech synthesizer in 1974 and was a physics professor at UC Berkeley.

So he meets this guy, and basically, according to Moser, Sohn had an idea for a translator that would pronounce the word that you were trying to translate and came back to ask me if I could help him build a prototype. So it's just interesting to me where the story is generally, you know, Sohn, Masa Sohn invented this. Or, you know, they'll even say he co-invented this. But what really happened was...

I mean, with the depth of technical knowledge you get earning an economics degree. But just again, quoting from this physics professor at UC Berkeley, the beauty of his idea was not to create a translator, but to sell it. His plan was to set up kiosks and airports so you can rent it and could say hello

and other words in that language. He didn't know any electronics, but it was clear from the very beginning that he was an entrepreneurial genius. So what he actually did was take some of his money and meet a physics professor at UC Berkeley and was like, hey, if you invent this thing, I'll sell it. And that's what they did. did by 1979 he sold it to sharp for about 423 000 which is just over a million dollars in today's money so they split this and this is um not his first but uh his early fortune right because the other part is um from this same ars technica article he says while he's an undergrad at UC Berkeley, Masasan imported early consoles of Pac-Man and Space Invaders and leased them to local bars and restaurants in Northern California.

This is because Sohn's father ran a pachinko parlor and had access to early arcade units. Sohn reportedly made his first million dollars through these arcade games. So, you know, his dad has the pachinko parlors. He gets early access to Japanese arcade machines. He can, you know, send you know his dad has the pachinko parlors he gets early access to japanese arcade machines he can you know send them to his son on the cheap and then masa can sell them to california uh bars and restaurants you know what he says when uh those arcade machines start shipping over to america he summons them but you know the point of this story is he makes you know about a million dollars in today's money

off this translator that he gets his uc berkeley professor to invent for him and uh he gets his dad to send him arcade machines which he then sells um it makes another just over a million dollars so he graduates 1980 uh with you know between two and three million dollars net worth, U.S. dollars. And then he goes back to Japan because apparently the way he tells it, he promised his mom that he would come back to Japan after he graduated. After he graduated. So he graduates UC Berkeley, economics, 1980, goes back to Japan, has two or three million dollars and he founds soft bank in 1981 correct and then like the actual story of how he got the money to inflate the first tech bubble is is kind of uh muddled but um the the basic thing that i found from a harvard

business interview he gave and this is of course his version of events so take him with a grain of salt he was uh interviewed by a young upstart investor that is true we were talking about the vision fund like you know so 45 billion comes from um saudi arabia i think 23 billion comes from soft bank um and then like another 4 billion from from Qualcomm Foxconn the slavery manufacturing company another $20 billion from Apple maybe not $20 billion but some from Apple Sean's reading off

Slack right now another SoftBank property oh yeah it's only like $1.5 from Apple, Qualcomm well like collectively it looks like Apple I'm just reading off fd right now apple qualcomm foxconn and their company called sharp collectively contributed about six billion but the point pretty you know pretty sizable yeah but i guess the point was some other graphic

yogi found was like seven billion we just don't know where it came from. And we think it actually came from the proceeds of the Jeffrey Epstein blackmail network. Yeah, the graphic I found was from 2017 with the $45 billion from Saudi Arabia, the $28 billion from SoftBank, $15 billion from the Mubadala? Oh, yeah, an Abu Dhabi UAE fund. A billion from Apple, four billion from Foxconn, Qualcomm, and Sharp, and then seven billion. Just unknown. Who knows where it came from?

Just all from the U.S. Virgin Islands. Just one account in Little St. James. Relatedly at the Burqa Coalition facility in Yemen, detainees described being interrogated while naked Bound and blindfolded Sexually assaulted and raped

At Bur Ahmed Prison Forces of the United Arab Emirates Raided the facility and perpetrated sexual violence In March 2018 Nearly 200 detainees were stripped naked In a group while personnel from the UAE Forcibly examined their anuses During the search Multiple detainees were raped digitally stripped naked in a group while personnel from the uae forcibly examined their anuses during

the search multiple dn uh detainees were raped digitally and with tools and sticks the uae is of course a um ally in the saudi coalition yeah this is uh the the the 45 this shit's fucked up that is fucking dark i think you know one of the reasons why i mentioned why like this the most amount of money we've talked about the show is like people don't you know at least i didn't know much about softbank period and it's fucking a behemoth yeah and like if you like look up softbank commercials it's like tarantino is in a softbank commercial there's a brad pitt commercial that was directed by wes anderson. Anytime you've heard about a Japanese commercial

that just fucking gave American celebrity millions of dollars, yeah, it's SoftBank. Corruption runs deep. How deep? Fucking Tarantino's in on the action. A group of experts investigated cases of sexual violence in the Burrican Migrant Detention Center in Aden. We keep trying to get the comedy back on track.

Several hundred Eritrean, Ethiopian, and Somali migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees who had been rounded up and detained by the Security Belt forces. Security Belt, of course, is coalition forces. Conditions in the detention facility were dire. Rapes and sexual assault reportedly occurred in various parts of the facility, often in full view of other detainees, including family members and guards. Andy's Morbid reality corner. Survivors and witnesses described to the experts how each night guards selected women and boys for abuse.

One former detainee described a guardroom with three beds where several guards assaulted several women simultaneously. Women were told to submit to rape or commit suicide. Others reported that individuals trying to resist or intervene were beaten shot or killed at least uh once guards ordered hundreds of ethiopian male detainees to stand naked for hours in front of dozens of ethiopian female detainees as punishment reportedly verbal threats of rape accompanied the punishment but what about the crazy town butterfly hybrid masayoshi san version that you got andy what about that why can't we play more of that and less of these yemen that was actually what masa said to the detainees good song yeah um all right well look here's the actual, to get back to the story of Masa, in 1992, Harvard Business

Review interview, he says, when I first started the company, I only had two part-time workers in a small office. I got two Apple boxes. I stood up on them in the morning to give a speech. I said to my two workers, you guys have to listen to me because I am the president of this company. In five years, I'm going to have 75 million in sales. In five years, I will be supplying 1,000 dealer outlets and will be the number one PC software distributor.

The two guys both quit. And then he says, that was 1981. About a year and a half later, we were supplying 200 dealer outlets. Now we supply 15,000 in 1992. In 10 years, we've gone from two part-time employees um to 570 employees uh doing software distribution book and magazine publishing telephone uh least cost routing system integration network computing blah blah blah making about 350 million dollars and his soft bank is originally a bank for software he's like okay the pc revolution is here i'm going to give people an outlet where they can get all these different softwares for their... Listen, I know that most people would give shit to those two employees that left because the company became so successful.

But I bet they heard that and went, I am not trying to work that hard. Yeah. Well, they were probably like, oh, yeah, this guy's insane. And then that kind of pitch only works on just fucking inbredred saudi royals with 45 billion dollars to blow where did we explain that pitch where he talks to mbs for 45 minutes and he says i have a one trillion dollar gift for you you give me 100 billion dollars and i will give you a trillion dollars yeah it's a solid grip yeah but yeah yeah it is just like, you have to be like, kind of not all, you don't have, you have to have zero street smarts in order to just give somebody $45 billion. You know what's better than $100 billion?

$1 trillion. One common practice involved security forces abducting and raping women or threatening to as a way to extort money from their families and communities. Security forces repeatedly entered homes at night and took women to rape. Community leaders estimated receiving steady reports of sexual violence every few nights. The authorities did not conduct investigations or make arrests in relation to these violations. I don't really know how to respond to that at all. Yeah, it's dark as shit, but Andy's right. I mean, all this shit that i didn't know before

this episode is literally funneled through softbank and that's fucked up well they indirectly i mean the vision through the vision fund right a lot of their inflows are from saudi who are committing these atrocities yeah i mean yeah the reason I keep mentioning these is that by taking their money, they're legitimizing this horrendous regime. And it's very easy to just like tuck into the background all these human rights violations that the Saudis are committing as so many people want to do.

And people keep coming back to Jamal Khashoggi, which of course was a terrible murder. But that's only just a tiny tip of the iceberg in this horrific genocide and it's it's worth repeating that these are the people that you know these beloved billionaires are uh justifying to themselves that it's okay to do business with the people who are doing these horrible horrible things and continue to do them and And they continue to, you know, he's promising a trillion dollars to this guy who's unleashing this hell in this corner of the world.

Yeah, like however outlandish the trillion dollar, I mean, it's probably not going to happen. But what he's saying is like, I'm perfectly fine doing business with these people. And I'm not going to use the clout of my otherwise still multi-billion dollar operation to curtail this behavior that's atrocious it goes back to what Fujita said there's no morality in money I get

it is what's how you get it's not important having it is and it's now you know the reason I mentioned the Fujita side of this is because his idols are a samurai and a guy that literally think the Jews of Osaka are the reason why he's better at business. But so like to kind of like close out the bio and get us up to the present, you know, so the way he describes it is according to the New York Times, he's starting the software distribution. He sets up a booth at a consumer trade show, and what he says is, according to this New York Times article in 1995, he offered software companies free space to display their products. The booth was mobbed, but the retailers that attended that show dealt directly with the software manufacturers, bypassing Mr. Son, the middleman. I probably made back one-twentieth of the cost of my booth, he told the Harvard Business Review. After that, many people were laughing. were laughing even pay the babes after that many people were laughing at me they said that guy's really dumb he's a nice guy but dumb um and so the way he actually goes on to

to explain uh to the harvard business review he says you know i made back 120 of my money but he says that actually one person did call me from Osaka a few weeks after the show. He said, we're starting a big PC shop and we need software. Please come and talk to me. I said, sorry, but I'm too busy to make the trip right now. Actually, I wasn't busy, but I didn't have the money to go to Osaka. He says, my company's name is Joshin Denkai. Have you heard of us? I said, no, I didn't know the company. It turns out it's the third largest home electronics dealer in Japan. He said, please ask Sharp was the company. It turns out it's the third largest home electronics dealer in Japan. He said, please ask Sharp, was the company he sold the electronic dictionary to.

Ask who we are. If you make up your mind to come to Osaka, we'd be happy to see you. He says, you know, he did ask Sharp and Sharp told him, hey, go out there. Sharp recommended them, you know. And so he goes out. He meets the third largest home electronics dealer in Japan. He actually manages to say to them, I need exclusive purchasing rights for all PC software for Josh and Denkai. And, you know, he manages through force of personality and through his connections to Sharp and other people to say,

Josh and Denkai says, OK, yeah, we will give you exclusive rights. then suddenly he has uh they have the biggest stores specializing in pcs in japan he has exclusive rights to their software all of a sudden and then he tells harvard business after i got jocelyn den kai i went to many other department stores and electronic shops uh have you seen jocelyn den kai they're the largest pc dealer in japan now and do you know why they're so successful because they have the software and i have the exclusive on that software. So once he gets this Joss and Den Kai account, which he does get from this supposedly failed trading show and from his previous connections, then it's just a snowball because you've got the third largest electronics, you have exclusive software rights to them, and then you can sell to everybody else based on that.

So, you know, this is how he builds his fortune throughout the 1980s and has the growth we mentioned beforehand. Yeah. And this is how he becomes the richest person in the world for three days at one point. Right. Because, you know, he grows. He also gets the moniker the Bill Gates of Japan during state run telecom is privatized in 1985. So he starts Japan Telecom in 1984. It's now SoftBank Telecom. Later, he gets, he's like friends with Steve Jobs. In 2008, he gets exclusive rights to sell the iPhone in Japan. So he, you know, gets a big chunk of the Japanese cellular market. But I just want to mention here, according to Wired, he, in the 1990s, you know, by the 90s, he's rich. By the late 80s, including Cosmo.com, More.com, Sports Brain, and Webvan. And of course, all of these things exploded with the dot-com crash and cost him, as we mentioned, $70 billion of net worth. But I guess my point in mentioning

all that is we look at the situation today where he's inflating WeWork, he's inflating Uber and all these other things. And he did the same fucking thing in the 90s. He inflated all these dot-com dogs and he lost $70 billion of net worth. So you do worry about deja vu. History repeats itself. late 90s to do his part along with other venture capitalists and private equity and edge funds to bid up all of those assets in the tech sector right and like one of his successful ventures is he starts yahoo japan in 1996 as a joint venture with yahoo he goes out to the california and he meets jerry yang the founder of yahoo and just gives him a hundred million dollars when he had

like 10 employees you know because his eyes were strong or whatever else the case may be. But, um, but I think that kind of brings us up to the present, you know, where it's like, of course there's a million different investments we could go through, but that's the story you need. That's what you need to know as to how he got this money is, you know, and of course in the year 2000, he invests, he invests in Alibaba and makes $60 billion some return. So he's so dominant.

And then now he goes back on the road and he gets this Vision Fund. And the Vision Fund is kind of the big thing that they're doing right now. And he has great burns on Twitter when someone asks him, hey, is your hairline receding? He said, my hairline's not receding, I am advancing. I think about this guy, he's exceedingly charming, but the devil is a charming motherfucker. I guess with the time we have left, we can talk a bit more about the Vision Fund

and what's actually going on with this $100 billion fund. Yeah, so there's 10 members of this. Half of them from Deutsche Bank and Goldman Sachs and then the other half are various people that have worked with Masayoshi-san in a few other places and like Masayoshi-san's main sort of enforcer on the board is this guy named Nariv Misra and he's been presiding over these sort of internal divisions in the company about um sorry it's rajiv misra

sorry but i could continue yeah you know rajiv misra i just like that um ford for uh sorry wired magazine interviewed rajiv misra and according to the person who wrote the article uh misra was vaping throughout the entire interview so this guy guy running the largest private fund in history really can't put down the jewel long enough to talk to Wired. Yeah. And the Vision Fund is just like so much more worrying to me than WeWork or Uber

or any of their individual investments. Because like we said, it's just sort of like the same, some of the same structural problems writ large right a hundred billion dollars largest uh private pool of money ever assembled yeah um there's no over there's very little oversight in terms of like uh financial authorities in the u.s uk or japan right over what's going on with all this money and the pitch for the plan is that it's a 300 year plan that's the concept of the vision fund yeah they have a 300 year plan

where a significant amount of it is underwritten off oil revenue so you seem like you have like the ideas of the past right right like something we should be moving beyond yeah in a very broad sense is actually fueling its rise right and i mean like when you break down masayoshi san he's a man that uh owns uh boston dynamics a company making robots and he owns all of arm which does all of the microchips and he believes that singularity will be good for humanity i mean if that's not the workings for the future evil dictator of tomorrow, then I don't know what is. Right. I just wanted to read this quote from Wired about the Vision Fund. The investment hypothesis underpinning the Vision Fund centers around scale, a winner-take-all strategy. They target companies with 50% or 80% market share and overinvest it to enable these companies to grow fast and globally.

That's something I learned from Masa, Misra says. It is more important to grow fast. Is it more important to grow fast or be efficient? Efficient means getting your costs right and your profits right. It's not about counting the number of dollars you spend on stationery that's important and building step-by-step in the U.S. or India. Our view is that companies need to scale first. Once you scale, you'll get everything else right.

The global barriers are coming down. So if you don't become global fast, someone else will do it. And you see that again and again in all these fucking unicorn startups where it's like they don't care that WeWork is just burning cash or Uber. They don't care that they're not doing anything efficiently.

They just think, okay, once we get 80% market share. And what we're seeing with kind of the coming.com tech collapse is people are saying the rope is running out. They're like, you can't just grow market share forever. You have to be able to turn a profit at some point. One of the measures that I really like to look at for the stock market is one called the Shiller PE ratio or the ratio of, it of a moving a long-term moving average of the

price of the stock market relative to the equity or how much the underlying companies are worth and the only the highest point was right on the eve of the dot-com bust so that was about that was when the ratio is about 43 times, and it's currently at the second highest ever level, about 30, and it's rising. The only other time it's basically at the same level as Black Tuesday in 1929, right before the Great Stock Market crash. And Shiller himself, the economist who made this thing, would probably dissuade anyone from

using it as an indicator of recession or as just into your stock performance but it's nonetheless like really troublesome to look at this chart we're like okay the only other time this happened is when there was a massive tech boom yeah uh tech uh tech asset boom right Right. Like he's spent, you know, billions now and in the lead up to the... It's like he's a guy who got rich and then dumped all of his money into inflating the values of tech, not once but twice.

So, you know, I mean, it's like this guy that not everybody has heard of who's one of the most consequential wealthy people in history in the sense that he's managed to convince, know mbs and all these other wealthy people to like give me the largest investment fund in history and uh i'm going to inflate my second tech bubble you've just got so much fucking money and you just bid up the price of all of these tech stocks and eventually the bottom falls out just because you know this is what's the term irrational exuberance also also

show her yes actually irrational exuberance these these tech stocks the same as all the fucking dot-coms he bought in the 90s and now that all the apps he's buying now many of them have no possible way of making money so you know uh forbes says he's worth now about uh 18.6 billion so he doesn't quite get to lose 70 billion this time time, but I could see him losing $12 billion or something like that. And I did just want to mention, I forgot to say this earlier, according to his biography, when his company's growing in the 1980s, he's actually sidelined for a little while. Oh, yes.

According to the New York Times, he's actually sidelined. From 1983 to 1986, Mr. Sohn had to relinquish the presidency of SoftBank when he was hospitalized with hepatitis. With a phone, fax,

and a computer in his room, he says, he continued to give advice, returning to the helm after he recovered. And that seems to be like everybody's profile of him is he's like,

not actually a good manager, but he's like a charismatic enough salesman. Yeah, and then he's persistent. He won't stop pestering you until he gets his way. He said that, you know, with Fujita, that he gave like a hundred phone calls before he was like, fuck it, I'm going to fly to him. Like that, you know, even if you dislike the person,

you're like, that motherfucker's probably going to get the job done. Right. There's also this, actually, if you dislike the person, you're like, that motherfucker's probably going to get the job done. Right. There's also this, actually, I guess we just missed it, this New York Times profile of kind of the fallout of SoftBank.

And it talks about how SoftBank will just pump money into startups that will actually have the side effect of devastating existing companies. For instance, it starts out with the story

of this hotel in New Delhi that was running pretty well. And then someone from a new startup approached the owner of the hotel and said that they wanted to help them make it more of a business destination. And the startup was for luxury business business hotels and so they promised him that he would get a certain number of rooms rented out to business people whether or not people actually use the rooms and then as the company slowly went under the hotel was left high and dry because they had hitched themselves to this wagon and no one was actually going through this startup because the startup ended up being completely uh you know worthless and um basically like one of the side

effects then of softbank is they're you know propping up uh all these uh startups that uh including you know things like uber where they upend other industries while turning people into contractors but then those contractors get no benefits, and so on and so forth. For instance, of course, in California, Uber is fighting a new California law that forces Uber to give its drivers health insurance, which, wow, so unjust. But it's, yeah, and this guy, SoftBank is at the... Yeah, I don't know if we covered this, but Masayoshi, one, you know, this guy, SoftBank is, you know, at the... Yeah, I don't know if we covered this, but Masayoshi, one of his practices, if he wants to buy your company and you say no, he just invests the money in other companies.

Or it's like a threat during the negotiations. Right, right. And I mean, like, you know, with a man that has billions of dollars, how are you going to fight that? Yeah, I do like how we like challenged ourselves. What if we destroyed WeWork and now we challenge ourselves. What if we destroyed the global economy? What if we took down

the largest investment fund in history? I mean, that was my goal from the start. Well, we wouldn't have as many episodes to do, Sean. And I think that's the best benefit from it. Yeah. And just to kind of go over, we should mention his younger brother also became a billionaire as the chairman of a company called Gung Ho.

So, you know, stuff we miss with SoftBank, we'll be able to follow up there. Gung Ho is the maker of the world's best-selling smartphone game, Puzzles and Dragons. Oh, that sounds completely legitimate. Masayoshi Son was an early investor in his brother's company. Really? Yeah. And then just from The Economist, he gives this speech where he talks about how we at SoftBank and the investors in SoftBank, we are the new gentry at the start of the Industrial Revolution. Right.

And that really does give you an idea of this guy's mind where he thinks the gentry at the start of the Industrial Revolution were the good guys you know the people who drove the proletariat into the factories and destroyed all of kind of the harmony that comes with you know being able to control your own labor and these sorts of things and this kind of makes sense with the results in california so they like they lost that state supreme court case making it so uber uber drivers could be classified as employees that would need health benefits and so forth. And pretty soon after that, Uber's valuation dropped. It's predicated on just eradicating workers' rights. Right.

Cobra effect. Yeah, that's the entire independent contractor model is just we're disrupting the fucking Wagner Act from the New Deal, all the things that says you can unionize and you have to be paid minimum wage in this shit right um but it is like yeah he thinks they're the new gentry of the industrial revolution he talks about according to The Economist within 30 years he predicts the world will be populated by billions of robots many of them more intelligent than humans and so he says we're great we're the new gentry of the industrial revolution, the new industrial revolution, the robots, the singularity.

It is our job to control these robots. But that's a fucking terrifying vision. And they have to control these robots because actually in those Boston Dynamics videos with the fancy robots doing the obstacle courses, they're not actually automated. There's someone with a joystick behind the camera. And apparently they fall over way more often in person than they do in the YouTube videos. That's a highlight video. Even actual robotics professionals are often critical of these singularity people.

They're just like, you know, in very controlled conditions in labs, yeah, we've gotten robots to do some pretty amazing things. But they're often the first to tell you that like like robot like designed to pick apples or something still doesn't pick up like 30 50 percent of them yeah i will argue though masasan is less terrifying if it turns out he's a pump and dump scamster which is i think my read on this i think i think this thing is going down but if his vision is real where it's like 30 years billions of robots and we control all of them that is fucking terrifying just like you know the saudi arabian sovereign wealth fund where

we've read off you know a litany of war crimes and we could spend another three hours you know it's like this guy and a bunch of private industry controls all the robots that you know do all the tasks and uh manage every facet of our society like that's a dystopian fucking mega Orwellian future so the idea that he's just like ripping off a Saudi nonsense yeah a Saudi investment fund is much more comforting and I think probably more realistic I mean these these promises have gone back since you know even before computers where it's like with each technological iteration you say oh it's going to eliminate you you know, this kind of work. Well, then what the work shifts to is like instead of hand copying, you know, balance sheets, now you have to set up a spreadsheet.

Like you just have to go into the deeper and deeper levels of the technology to make it work. And so nothing's ever eliminating work. You're always just going to keep going deeper into the system. Right. And like, even, you know, on the eve of this, like as this climate crisis, sorry to bring up again,

gets even, gets even more intense. Like, so all the green new deal stuff that's going to require tons and tons of work that robots have so far not been able to do like physical tasks, engineering tasks and all that, that we would never trust a robot and so like you know the jobs are there's no shortage of job we can have as many jobs or as

few as we want with like something like a federal jobs guarantee and there's like the robots can't be counted on to build dams and new new farm work and stuff like that yeah and there's always like eventualities that you can't predict. Right. And that's why the idea of like full automation, even when socialists claim that as a goal, it's a complete nonsense because you can never make a system so complete that it can predict all eventualities.

Well, we better hope MBS doesn't listen to this episode and start demanding his money back. But I think what we do need to do is figure out how to short SoftBank before we release this. I think that'd be good. And with that, this has been GrubStickers. I'm Yogi Poyl.

I'm Andy Palmer. Steve Jeffries. I'm Sean P. McCarthy. Thanks for listening. Check us out on Patreon. We'll be back next week. Bye.